French Muslims in a Time of War

The street scene on Monday, in Paris, around the corner from Café Bonne Biere and Casa Nostra, where at least five people were killed in Friday night’s attacks.

Photograph by Peter Van Agtmael / Magnum for The New Yorker

Last Friday, around eleven in the evening Paris time, I got a call from Fouad Ben Ahmed. He was the protagonist of my piece in August on French Muslims in the banlieues of Paris, and now he was saying something about attacks on a music club, a stadium, and some restaurants. The terrorist assault was still going on as he spoke, but the news was already overwhelming. “C’est catastrophique,” Ben Ahmed said.

Ben Ahmed lives northeast of Paris, in a largely immigrant area known as Department 93. He is one of the large number of French Muslims who have assimilated into French society and don’t want to repudiate either half of their identity. According to the French authorities, among the terrorists who blew themselves up after mowing down scores of concertgoers at the Bataclan theatre was Samy Amimour, born in Drancy, Ben Ahmed’s birthplace. Amimour’s family lives in Bobigny, where Ben Ahmed grew up and began his career working in local government. Amimour had gone to Syria to join the Islamic State last year, and his father travelled there to try to get him to return home. “He was with another man who never left us alone. Our reunion was very cold,” the father told Le Monde, after returning to France empty-handed. Over the weekend after Friday night’s attacks, Bobigny was swarming with police, especially around L’Abreuvoir, the housing project where Ben Ahmed spent his teens, and where the terrorists’ car was spotted driving around on Thursday night. On Monday, with a state of emergency in force in France, several of Amimour’s family members in Bobigny were under arrest.

The Paris attacks were a shock, but not a surprise. The scale of the carnage, the banal and carefree locations that the terrorists chose for their murderous work—these were hard to anticipate. But no one who paid attention to the attacks in Paris last January, to the number of French citizens who have joined the Islamic State (more than fifteen hundred), and to the Islamic State’s obsession with retaliatory violence in the land of the “Crusaders,” should have been surprised that something like this would happen somewhere in France. The United States presents a harder target than Europe, but with the U.S. leading the air campaign against ISIS for more than a year (in the past week alone, American strikes reportedly killed the Islamic State’s Libyan leader, and the sadistic British executioner Mohamed Emwazi, known as Jihadi John), no one should doubt that America is in the group’s crosshairs, too.

On Monday, I asked Ben Ahmed how the reaction around him compared to the response to the attacks on the humor magazine Charlie Hebdo and on Hypercacher, a kosher supermarket, in January. Those attacks united the French majority, but many Muslims declined to join the public displays of solidarity with the victims, whether because they found Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons blasphemous, or because they didn’t feel much sympathy for French Jews, or because they felt immediately, unfairly stigmatized. Conspiracy theories were aired on social media. “Je suis Charlie” became a divisive slogan (although Ben Ahmed himself embraced it), and a debate over blasphemy, discrimination, and free speech spread from France to the rest of the West, including the U.S.

This time, there’s very little division. The targets were random people, many of them young, enjoying themselves on a Friday night. “There’s much less ‘I’m French,’ ‘I’m not French,’ ” Ben Ahmed said over the phone. “The targets were all the French.” This time, there were no reported incidents, as in January, of banlieue high-school students refusing to observe the nationwide minute of silence. Even Ben Ahmed’s friend Stéphane (I wrote about him in “The Other France”), who is sympathetic to anti-Semitism and argued with Ben Ahmed over the shootings at Charlie Hebdo—Stéphane’s attitude of “Yes, but” angered Ben Ahmed—was in tears when they talked about Friday night’s massacre. “There’s no debate now,” Ben Ahmed said. “The only debate is what will come next.”

But now there’s more fear. A Muslim friend of Ben Ahmed’s, accompanying his wife on a trip to the hospital, was told that he had to wait for her outside, while other couples were allowed in together. Ben Ahmed believes that the fear will be hard on everyone—on non-Muslims who look at their Muslim countrymen with anxiety, on Muslims who sense the blame falling on them. He holds out a small hope that France’s leaders will be able to help the country come together by cautioning against scapegoating. This time around, though, the official response is likelier to be more punitive than in January, when the Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls appealed to the universal values of the republic. Now the talk is all about security. France is having regional elections next month. Ben Ahmed expects the far-right National Front to do well.

On Monday, President François Hollande declared, “France is at war.” That was President George W. Bush’s response on September 11, 2001. It’s understandable—in a sense, it’s undeniable—but such calls to arms lead to far more questions than answers. How should France, the U.S., and their allies fight a jihadi organization that controls territory, resources, and populations in the ungoverned spaces of the Middle East, and that also has the will and ability to strike hard in the West, deploying hostile citizens of the countries it wants to hit? As a start, with heightened security and intelligence, of course. But what about troops in Syria and Iraq, as some of the Republican Presidential candidates are demanding? None of them has thought past the near-term satisfaction of seeing ISIS militarily battered. Without local Sunni Arab allies willing to fight and die to beat the Islamic State, Western troops can’t hold territory or end the caliphate. That should have been one of the lessons of Iraq. Even the Kurds, who are doing a better job than anyone of fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, have no desire to be the occupiers of Arab populations.

The Islamic State inspires young Muslims, like the ones who wreaked havoc in Paris last Friday, by offering them the prospect of power, righteousness, camaraderie, and adventure in a world purified of contaminants. It’s a vision; a cause; a promise of the fallen, vapid world made meaningful and whole. It’s a modern phenomenon—it has as much to do with the Middle Ages as Italian fascism had to do with Ancient Rome. It’s one more terrifying example of the modern person’s quest to fill the empty space of the soul with a total solution. It’s also the most extreme manifestation of a generation-long revolution in Sunni Islam, and the most up-to-date, for ISIS has the ability to find alienated souls where they are and pull them into its apocalyptic dream. Al Qaeda is no longer the extreme wing of global jihad.

Because of its ultra-extreme character, the Islamic State has to be defeated militarily; but alone, without a political plan and an intellectual countercampaign, that’s a doomed response. So a strategy with any chance of success has to involve some combination of force and politics: air strikes, to keep pressure on the Islamic State’s positions, damage its sources of cash, and pick off important leaders, yielding tactical and psychological advantages; support for friendly ground forces, including the Syrian and Iraqi Kurdish militias, which have made significant recent gains on the battlefield; intense efforts to bring other European and Arab countries into a meaningful anti-ISIS coalition; equally intense efforts, involving Iran and Russia, to force a political solution on Bashar al-Assad leading to his departure; a sophisticated ideological response, tailored to the realities of diverse societies, led by figures outside government, and not least by Muslims, that places jihadism beyond the pale.

Elements of this strategy have been the Obama Administration’s approach since it began air strikes against ISIS, in the summer of 2014. But it hasn’t been considered deeply or articulated well as a strategy, or carried out with much determination. The fight against ISIS is horribly complicated and difficult; even the right strategy won’t achieve decisive results anytime soon. If this is a war, it’s a long one.

What shouldn’t the U.S., France, and the West do? We shouldn’t imagine that the might of our armed forces can achieve anything more than a temporary victory in Syria and Iraq. We shouldn’t abandon the values we claim to uphold by closing the doors to desperate refugees, who, after all, are fleeing the kind of places where last Friday in Paris is an ordinary night. We shouldn’t allow fear to tear apart fragile social fabrics.